The 'Zone' in the book and the film adapted from it was inspired by a nuclear accident that took place near Chelyabinsk in 1957. Several hundred square kilometers were polluted by fallout and abandoned, although there was no official mention of this incident and a "forbidden zone" for many years.
Director Andrei Tarkovsky spent about a year shooting all of the exterior scenes. The first part of this shoot was done over the spring and summer of 1977 with cinematographer Georgi Rerberg, using a new Kodak 5247 film stock provided by movie producer Sergio Gambarov. However, after developing these negatives, they came back with an unwatchable shade of dark green. According to the film's sound technician Vladimir Sharun, Tarkovsky always claimed that the movie was sabotaged by one of his enemies, a "well-known Soviet film director": the Kodak 5247 stock was reportedly stolen, and ended up in the hands of this director, while Tarkovsky unknowingly got a regular Kodak stock in return that was then developed incorrectly. Sharun, however, attributed the problem on "the usual Russian sloppiness", as the Kodak 5247 was newer to Soviet laboratories at the time, who didn't know how to properly process it. The disaster proved to be the final straw for Rerberg, who got the blame for the incident and was released from the film, so Tarkovsky had to shoot most of the film again with a new cinematographer, Aleksandr Knyazhinskiy (only one shot filmed by Rerberg of a dust storm blowing over the marshes remains in the final film). This contributed to the film's two-part narrative structure. Allegedly, the newly shot footage strayed even farther away from the source novel 'Roadside Picnic', and had a different look. Asked about this, director Tarkovsky said "no mother gives birth to the same child twice."
It is said that the rushes of the first version of the film (shot by cinematographer Georgi Rerberg) were kept by editor Lyudmila Feyginova in her home for years. They were destroyed by a fire in 1988 that also claimed her life.
The film contains 142 shots in 163 minutes, with an average shot length of more than one minute and many shots lasting for more than four minutes.
To allow changes to the color tone of a long strip of film over an extended take, director Andrei Tarkovsky built a long film processing vat which had different temperatures along the way.